A babies and booze TV horror

IT was compulsive viewing — half an hour of “Panorama” focusing on the drink culture of Oldham’s Yorkshire Street then straight over to BBC2 for “The Trouble With Girls”, a look at three 16-year-olds from Rochdale, two of whom give birth while they should have been taking their GCSEs.

Not so much documentaries as horror films.

Anyone living south of Stockport could now be forgiven for thinking we’re all a load of ill-educated, racist, drunken thugs who think you spell laundrette, l-a-w-n . . . and that we spend every Friday and Saturday night staggering from one bar to the next, downing shots of anything alcoholic and throwing up in the street.

Nice image — bound to attract the tourists the council was hoping for.

If the powers-that-be at Oldham Council thought they were doing the town some kind of favour by involving themselves in Monday’s episode of “Panorama”, I presume they now stand corrected.

Not that they’re exclusively to blame, I don’t suppose. They say they can’t do anything about licensing laws — yet when I was a licensee one of the ways you could lose that privilege was to sell more alcohol to a drunk. Offering hard liquor at £1 a shot is nothing short of criminal.

Treble the price of alcohol and then let’s see what happens. You wouldn’t need “post office-style” queues (whoever came up with that brainless idea?) because these kids wouldn’t be able to afford to get so drunk they lose control.

Why can’t planners refuse permission to open bars in already bar-soaked streets? Or is it just granny flats and bathroom extensions they can turn down?

And then there are the idiots who spend their hard-earned cash (or our hard-paid taxes) on drinking themselves stupid every weekend.

Perhaps the girls “Panorama” featured are now so appalled at their behaviour — mooning at the camera — that they sign the pledge. Whoever it was that told them staggering around Yorkshire Street, showing all they’ve got, was attractive, was lying.

Was it like this in our day? Of course not.

Oh, we’ve all been drunk (a bottle of local brandy on a beach in Cyprus when I was 15 springs to mind — my father grounded me pocket money-less for three months) but a few vodka and limes soon cleaned us out of spends.

Mind, if the booze had been as cheap then, relatively speaking, as it is today, and our disposable income as great, who knows. . . maybe I, too, would have thrown caution (and my tea) to the wind . . .